Medicine: Health Care in Britain

My wife fell off a horse during a fox hunt, recalled the rich board
chairman of a British appliance company, "and she went into
Charing Cross for a tricky operation. They pinned her shoulder so it
wouldn't go out." London's Charing Cross Hospital is one of the
grimiest barracks of 3,119 hospitals run by Britain's National Health
Service, and the fox-hunting wife went in as an NHS patient. Explained
her husband, politically a Conservative: "In a private hospital,
my wife's operation would have cost me $700, but we got it free. NHS
takes a tremendous load off my mind."